Laundry nook in garage make-over - before and demo

I thought I would start off the new year with a bang and dive right into some remodeling. Remodeling is by far my biggest passion and if time and money allowed, I would do that all day long, day in and day out.

This year our major goals are to make our garage more functional, to overhaul our master suite - bedroom, bathroom and walk-in closet as well as giving our living and dining room a "once-over". I also have some smaller furniture makeover planned. The bulk of time and remodeling budget this year will go into the master suite make-over. I can't wait to get started!

I also plan to finally reveal all things stair case makeover as well as our original living room which was turned into a guest/game room with some built-ins.

But let's get back to the laundry nook in our garage.

Here is is in all its glory. Pay close attention to those magnificent cabinets above the laundry area. They are special. In that they are very poorly made out of crappy materials and built right onto the wall. Oh and neither plumb nor level. Other than that they are great!!

As you can see we have a lovely water heater and furnace right next to the laundry area and on the other side of the door is my "project" shelf. I think it could look prettier, no?

You can see that the project shelves are not all the way against the wall due to a stick of wood that was mounted to the wall near the top of it.

On the wall to the right of the project shelf are all our garden tools. We need something better there, I think.

Don't be scared, but I just opened the doors to those cabinets. They are pretty much just packed with clutter. That has to go.

And so it did - aaaaand....

So did the cabinets. The water on the floor is from when we disconnected the washer and dryer. Not water damage.

Check out what was above the cabinets that I never noticed before? An electrical outlet. Hot and all meaning not hooked into any switch so it could not be turned off. Lovely. We had that fixed and I modified my plans to include a lamp over this area.

I got our handyman to make us some walls to make a little bit more sense of it all. Of course I had to get in on the action as well. Here I am nailing together some of the half wall that will go into the new nook.

And here they are all set up. We used pressure treated wood to go against the concrete and anchored it into the garage floor. If you choose to do this, you must first make VERY sure that you don't have a house with a tension slab or the consequences could be very dire. We already knew that we didn't from when we dug into the garage floor to tie in new plumbing to the shower we added to our powder room a while back.

The new wall on the left will help divide the space up so we can hide the water heater and furnace later. The pony wall on the right will serve as a "holder" for a table top over the appliances.